Scandinavia and the World

Could it depend on how you define "controversy"? I sort of have this image in my head of a Swedish Grandma watching a scene in a crime drama and going "Oh my!" And the "Oh my!" response spreads across the country like wildfire.

My mom and grandma really like crime/mystery shows but I'm squeamish though I like the mystery part. I try to avoid seeing the dead body.

Or are crime shows different than the police procedural that are so popular in the anglosphere?

edited 27th Aug '17 9:14:20 AM by phantom1

In Nordic crime shows, there's usually more focus on the criminals than the cops, although it varies. Quite often, the crimes are very gritty, as well; not just robberies and such, or even the sort of murders you see in English-language cop shows. You know, prostitution, sexual violence, human trafficking, hard drugs, that sort of stuff. Think Breaking Bad, but usually a bit more dark.

It's not always that dark, though; but it often is, especially with crime movies. (If you've seen The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, you've got an idea.)

Best cop show I've ever watched was a Swedish/Danish co-production set around that wee river crossing thingy you've got in the Øresund.

I cannot grasp the appeal of crime shows. Even as the usually succeed catching the criminals, it's a pyrrhic victory at best. They victim(s) is/are already dead. The whole format wallows in depressing misery. But that's apparently what a majority of people like.

It depends on the agent or detective that figures out the crime and the criminal, and how he/she figures it all out. Hence why some crime shows (most?) are ultimately centred around distinctive characters (e.g. Poirot, Sarah Lund, Chief Inspector Barnaby, to name a few). The modus operandi of the one who investigates and/or the criminal is one of the key ingredients in a crime show.

As for the misery element... well, there's a Nordic stereotype regarding misery, for some reason (even though crime shows are an universal cultural product, with various local particular elements around the world's countries).

edited 29th Aug '17 6:20:49 AM by Quag15

Cold Reality Shower

I've heard that it's a lot easier for Swedes and Norwegians to understand each others' languages than it is Danish, but I didn't realize they thought it was easier for Danes to learn Norwegian and Swedish.

A similar thing happens in Romance languages. It's a lot easier to understand Portuguese and Italian knowing Spanish than it is to understand French.

I've heard that the Swedish spoken by Swedish-speaking Finns is the variety of Swedish that is most easy to understand for people from other Nordic countries, because it's influenced by the pronunciation rules of Finnish (in which there are never two different pronunciations for a given letter) and basically immune to Swedish regional dialects, so it sounds sort of "neutral" and old-fashioned (in a good way, for the sake of comprehension). My Swedish is nowhere near good enough that I could notice something like that, myself - I have to rely on what I've heard from others.

I suppose it's kind of similar to how, when people from different regions of the UK and US are talking in a group with non-native speakers, sometimes there's the least confusion when the non-native is speaking. Part of it is that they're making extra effort, but they're also likely to keep the language very simple, and they probably aren't using many expressions that are exclusive to a given region. (There's also the "Transatlantic English" thing, but that will really depend on how much contact the speaker in question has with both sides of the Atlantic, so it's more or less a matter of luck whether they'll speak what amounts to a neutral middle ground in terms of dialect.)

People say that to Swedish speakers, Danish sounds like someone's trying to speak Swedish but they've stuffed their mouth full of potatoes for some reason before they started talking. (Finnish, of course, sounds completely made-up and alien to people who speak one of the other Nordic languages, so I'm not going to laugh at Danes for being hard to understand.)

edited 8th Sep '17 4:02:02 PM by BestOf

Meanwhile, I've heard that a lot of people, who speak neither language, can mistake English for German, and vice versa.

Children's Entertainer

Let Italian Men Live.

Ya know, sometimes the men's rights movement really is NOT "I just wanna go back to the old patriachy!". Tis the greatest shame especially among those clamoring for gender equality that others continually think that's all they are or want.

Because unfortunately, at least in the English speaking world, is that the "Go Back to the Old Patriarchy" version have in recent years dominated the discourse by sheer dint of volume and vitriol if nothing else.

Also kind of the opposite reaction to staying with your parents. Which I'm sure has it's own drawbacks. But the movements seems like it would put less pressure on women.

edited 22nd Sep '17 4:08:04 PM by phantom1

I know that in the English speaking world there's a divide over the name to use for the movement, out of those fighting to allow men more autonomy and to break down gender roles there's a split, do we try and reclaim the name "men's rights movement" from the toxic dude-bros or do we just accept that the name is toxic and call ourselves something different (say "men's issues advocates")?

It's hard to make progress when your name keeps getting you confused with a bunch of assholes who keep insisting that they represent you (while also being a big part of the problem), but also the shit bags shouldn't get to take that name form us, especially when they don't actually give a dam about men's rights and just want to enforce their toxic standards onto everyone.

Most of the loud"MRA" people in English speaking circles are probably also not giving a crap about those issues for the Italian men

(Note the "s, mind.)

I mean, beside instrumentalizing them as 'See we have valid issues!' to deflect from the rampant misogyny of their rethoric

edited 23rd Sep '17 3:35:15 AM by 3of4

I've talked to loads of people who talk about men's rights and men's issues, and the ones who tend to be the most sensible and seem the most genuinely interested in identifying men's problems and finding solutions are just about always people who also identify as feminists. Which makes sense.

First time I heard of "men's right" it was in a feminist discussion circle. I was literally introduced to it as a subset of feminism. It was really weird to discover so many asshats using the term on the internet.

I had the opposite experience, actually: first heard of men's right through feminists on the Internet bashing it as another excuse for various chauvinists to cling to status quo (there are extremists on both sides...). Kinda refreshing to see there are circles when it's not seen as men complaining about women refusing to be sexually harassed.

It's the Little Things

He drew her wearing the Dutch flag.

I had to look 3 or 4 times before I figured out what the problem was.

I'm playing a pirate game with French and Dutch factions and I have this problem alllllll the time

I don't have this problem with European countries - I am European, after all, and I watch football and ice hockey and the Eurovision song contest and so on, so I'm exposed to those flags all the time. I do sometimes get African flags wrong, though, so I can relate. (I'd probably also make loads of mistakes if I had to connect all the flags of the Caribbean countries, or the island nations of the Pacific, to the corresponding countries.)

At least it wasn't a Russian flag.

In the comments somebody commented that France really should be America's mother in the comic, which inspired me to come up with the following tangled backstory of America's parentage.